Scarcely had the mate fetched a blanket from below and turned in on deck, than a brisk steady breeze sprang up from off the land, sending the Arangi through the smooth water at a nine-knot clip.  For a time Jerry tried to stand the watch with Skipper, but he soon curled up and dozed off, partly on the deck and partly on Skipper’s bare feet.

When Skipper carried him to the blanket and rolled him in, he was quickly asleep again; and he was quickly awake, out of the blanket, and padding after along the deck as Skipper paced up and down.  Here began another lesson, and in five minutes Jerry learned it was the will of Skipper that he should remain in the blanket, that everything was all right, and that Skipper would be up and down and near him all the time.

At four the mate took charge of the deck.

“Reeled off thirty miles,” Van Horn told him.  “But now it is baffling again.  Keep an eye for squalls under the land.  Better throw the halyards down on deck and make the watch stand by.  Of course they’ll sleep, but make them sleep on the halyards and sheets.”

Jerry roused to Skipper’s entrance under the blanket, and, quite as if it were a long-established custom, curled in between his arm and side, and, after one happy sniff and one kiss of his cool little tongue, as Skipper pressed his cheek against him caressingly, dozed off to sleep.

Half an hour later, to all intents and purposes, so far as Jerry could or could not comprehend, the world might well have seemed suddenly coming to an end.  What awoke him was the flying leap of Skipper that sent the blanket one way and Jerry the other.  The deck of the Arangi had become a wall, down which Jerry slipped through the roaring dark.  Every rope and shroud was thrumming and screeching in resistance to the fierce weight of the squall.

“Stand by main halyards!—­Jump!” he could hear Skipper shouting loudly; also he heard the high note of the mainsheet screaming across the sheaves as Van Horn, bending braces in the dark, was swiftly slacking the sheet through his scorching palms with a single turn on the cleat.

While all this, along with many other noises, squealings of boat-boys and shouts of Borckman, was impacting on Jerry’s ear-drums, he was still sliding down the steep deck of his new and unstable world.  But he did not bring up against the rail where his fragile ribs might well have been broken.  Instead, the warm ocean water, pouring inboard across the buried rail in a flood of pale phosphorescent fire, cushioned his fall.  A raffle of trailing ropes entangled him as he struck out to swim.

And he swam, not to save his life, not with the fear of death upon him.  There was but one idea in his mind. Where was Skipper?  Not that he had any thought of trying to save Skipper, nor that he might be of assistance to him.  It was the heart of love that drives one always toward the beloved.  As the mother in catastrophe tries to gain her babe, as the Greek who, dying, remembered sweet Argos, as soldiers on a stricken field pass with the names of their women upon their lips, so Jerry, in this wreck of a world, yearned toward Skipper.